The Great War had obviously a much reduced
impact on American society as it did not produce
thetabula rasa effect—the Great Influenza epi-
demics of 1918 may have been in fact more trau-
matic—and periodization tends to be slightly
different. The powerful efflorescence of a strongly
material and industrial culture was, on the other
hand, paramount. The involvement of artists in
commercial work, their questioning of their place
in society, and the ‘‘relevance’’ of their work, all
combined to focus the debate on the nature of
photography—and especially its autonomy in the
field of visual arts, a major difference from Eur-
opean practice. Despite concerns with the growing
materialism of the 1920s and the existence of a
strong documentary tradition, the project for most
American artistic photographers of the interwar
years remained internal to the medium.
The mutation of American photography away
from Pictorialism towards ‘‘pure’’ or ‘‘straight’’
photography began in the mid-teens, can be best
followed by the debate among the group surround-
ing Alfred Stieglitz—its galleries, exhibitions, and
publications (see the articles by Marius de Zayas
‘‘Photography,’’Camera Work41, January 1913,
and ‘‘Photography and Artistic-Photography,’’Ca-
mera Work42–43, April–July 1913, in which this
Mexican artist and friend of Stieglitz theorized the
‘‘truth function’’ of photography) and Clarence
White who formed a school, organized shows, and
publishedPictorial Photography in America(1920–
1929). The two groups were separated by strong egos
and a different relation to commercial assignments
and money—the financially independent Stieglitz
advocated absolute detachment from the constraints
of commissions or the market while predictably
White, who had to earn a living, more pragmatically
trained commercial photographers. But the work
they inspired is in fact quite complementary, and it
evidences the various reactions to and difficult inte-
gration in artistic discourse of mass culture.
After the late 1910s, Alfred Stieglitz kept his
strong intellectual presence especially through his
own production, in particular the O’Keeffe por-
traits, the ‘‘Equivalents’’ series and the views of
New York. His own practice did not necessarily
closely follow the strict ‘‘purist’’ aesthetics he advo-
cated but displayed a deep and original understand-
ing of the place of the eye in the modern sensibility.
The portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe began in 1918
and continued until the mid-1930s. Intimately linked
to the history of the couple, open-ended and totaliz-
ing, they constitute a truly photographic project,
playing on time, gaze, and alterity/difference. The
‘‘cloud’’ series, orSongs of the Skyand thenEquiva-
lentsas it came to be known (1922–1930) are images
of clouds without reference to the surrounding land-
scape, essentially made with a 45-inch camera. It
is a clear manifestation of symbolist theory, freeing
the image from any ‘‘referential’’ value (except for
the meteorologist...) and concentrating on the emo-
tion produced by the transcendental and the infinite
(Davis 121). The series of New York buildings Stie-
glitz made in the 1930s, mostly from his window, as
well as the Lake George images, although more
direct in its form, develop an idea of the intensely
spiritual but essentially personal relationship with
the world, neither intellectual nor simply sensual.
This approach marks a real distance with European
photography of the times, which had moved towards
high Modernism, and reinforces the connection with
what Edward Weston was doing in California. Wes-
ton, who had practiced pictorial photography since
1911 in Los Angeles, turned to ‘‘pure’’ photography in
the early 1920s after meeting the Stieglitz group. He
subsequently went to Mexico (with Tina Modotti)
before returning to California in 1926. His style and
subject matter increasingly emphasized the forms of
objects as rendered through a continually sharper use
of the optical qualities of the camera and the print.
His famous series of vegetables, nudes, and Western
landscapes form a coherent stylistic body of work
aiming at being essentially photographic and at
recording the ‘‘quintessence of the object.’’ They are
steeped in a philosophy borrowing largely from
Transcendentalism and sustaining a mystical ideal of
‘‘depiction of timeless and universal life rhythms.’’
(Davis 134).
Weston is also important for his institutional
activities. He was asked to prepare the West
Coast selection of the 1929Film und Fotoexhibi-
tion in Stuttgart and received in 1937 and 1938 the
first John Simon Guggenheim fellowships granted
to a photographer. In 1932, he formed around him
a group of photographers, among whom were
Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and his son
Brett, called Group f/64 and devoted to direct, pure
photography extending from the lens to the print.
The print was to be Ansel Adams’s main field of
expertise. Adams, who was training to become a
pianist, turned to photography under the influence
of Paul Strand and devoted his energy to making
perfect negatives and prints, and creating a form of
mystical realism that was to make him, in the
World War II and post-war years, the master
American landscape photographer.
The technical expertise that Adams refined in
printing is an interesting characteristic of the inter-
war period in the United States as opposed to a
freer, less ‘‘crafty’’ approach to the medium in Eur-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS